Page 69 of The Book of Lost Hours

AMELIA HIT THE GROUND, still feeling the grip of screaming darkness all around her.

She gasped for breath, knees and elbows scraping against wood.

She looked around the room expecting to see her uncle and Anton.

Nobody was there. The lights were off, the room completely dark.

She didn’t recognize this place. It looked like her uncle’s office.

His books were here. Some of the furniture was the same.

But it wasn’t the same place. The room was bigger.

There was a garden out the window with a large fountain that glittered in the moonlight.

It looked like something from out of a dream. Familiar, yet far away.

A light in the next room flipped on. Footsteps began walking across the floor. Amelia tried to stand but tripped on the edges of the coat. She let out a grunt of pain as she hit the floor again.

“Amelia?” a voice called out curiously.

She straightened up. Uncle Ernest?

The door opened. “Amelia, what are you…”

His words were cut short by the impact of her flying into his arms. She held on tight, ignoring every word he said until he hugged her back, confused but accepting of her affection.

“Why are you up so late?” he asked when she finally pulled away. “And what on earth are you wearing?”

Amelia studied his face. Did he not remember… any of it?

“I couldn’t sleep,” she said at last.

“Okay…” Uncle Ernest said. “That still doesn’t explain the coat.”

“Oh, it isn’t mine. I… I got it from the closet upstairs.”

“You did?” he said with a frown. A glimmer of recognition flitted in his eyes so quickly she couldn’t be sure if she imagined it. “Must have been your grandfather’s,” he said with a wry smile. “There’s still a bunch of his stuff all over his house. I can’t seem to get through it all.”

Something clicked in the back of her head.

The garden out back was familiar. This had been her grandmother’s home.

She remembered it from the funeral all those years ago.

Uncle Ernest had sold it and bought a smaller house nearby, where they stayed each summer when she was home from school, the demands of his job making him unable to keep up with the maintenance of such a place.

“Come on,” he said. “I’ll make you some tea, but then you need to go back to bed. You’ve got school tomorrow.”

He turned to go, and Amelia caught his hand, still reeling. “Wait. I need to ask you…” She hesitated. What if he had forgotten all of it? How would she explain?

“Could I have coffee this time?” she asked instead.

He laughed at her. “Oh, no. You’re not going to talk me into letting you have coffee. Fifteen is too young. I don’t care if your mother lets you have it when I’m not around.”

Amelia froze in shock. “My… my mother.”

“Apparently it’s the German thing to do. But I’m putting my foot down. I’m your father, I should be consulted about these things.”

He wasn’t angry, not really, but his words stunned Amelia so much that he had to reassure her several times that he wasn’t.

He snuck an extra teaspoon of honey into her tea before giving it to her.

As he slid the mug of tea across the table, Amelia noticed the familiar watch on his wrist, ticking away as if it was the most normal thing in the world.

Up in her bedroom, which looked like her normal bedroom, but also didn’t, she paced back and forth, racking her brain for what could have happened.

Could this actually be real? And if so, how was she supposed to know how this version of her life was supposed to have gone?

It wasn’t like she had any memory of it.

Suddenly, she stopped pacing, remembering what Azrael had said.

That she had shifted between two versions of the same memory.

Moved along her own temporal plane. Perhaps she could do that again.

She held still in the center of the room and shut her eyes, waiting to hear the echoes of Time…

A FTER MAKING sure that Amelia had gone back to bed, Ernest returned to his own. His wife was sitting up awake, ever the insomniac, a book of poems in one hand.

“Everything all right?” she asked.

“Mm-hmm,” Ernest said. He slid into bed beside her, leaning over to kiss her cheek. “It was just Amelia.”

Lisavet hummed softly and leaned into his kiss. “What is she doing up so late?”

Ernest shrugged. “Couldn’t sleep. Takes after her mother, I guess,” he said, tweaking her nose playfully.

He had met his wife when they were children.

Ernest’s father had owned a prestigious watch company here in Boston and had hired Ezekiel Levy, a clockmaker he’d met studying in Switzerland, to come work for him in early 1938.

The man had tried to put it off, but Gregory responded by offering him so much money that he couldn’t resist, uprooting his daughter and son and bringing them to the United States just ten months before Kristallnacht.

Ernest and Lisavet had met when she first arrived, but even with just two years between them, neither thought much of the other until Ernest took over his father’s company at twenty-four.

By that point, Lisavet had grown into both a watchmaker in her own right and the most beautiful woman Ernest had ever laid eyes on. They married four years later.

“By the way,” Ernest said, leaning his head against his wife’s arm sleepily. “We need to talk about this whole ‘coffee’ thing.”

Lisavet bit her lip, trying not to smile. “What about it?”

“Amelia is too young. I’ve been reading some of the research lately and…”

“Oh, are you a doctor and a watchmaker now?” she scolded warmly.

“I could be a doctor,” he said bitterly. “I’d make a damn good one.”

“Yes, I’m sure you would,” Lisavet said patronizingly. “Amelia will not perish from a little bit of coffee every now and then. It’s not like she’s running around smoking. Besides, I drank coffee when I was far younger than her. And I turned out all right.”

Ernest had to agree with her there. “That, my dear, is an understatement,” he said, raising himself up to kiss her. He ran his hand over her moonlight blond hair, letting it fall through his fingers. “You are as perfect as the moon and every last star in the sky.”

She laughed at him, abandoning her book as he pulled her down into bed beside him.

B Y MORNING, Amelia’s mind had settled. As she visited each memory as a spectator, the memories of this version of her life came to her, crowding for space alongside her other memories.

There existed two versions of her now. Both were true, and yet neither was more real than the other.

Time was an illusion and memory even more so.

In this life, she was happy. Or at least happier than she had been before.

This version of Amelia didn’t understand how good she had it.

She still had a penchant for trouble, though not quite as much.

She talked back to her mother and father, not knowing until now that, in another life, she had been an orphan.

Her father was a watchmaker, heir to the largest timepiece corporation in the country.

Her mother worked for the company, even though she didn’t have to.

They lived in this house. He had never gone to work for the State Department and didn’t need to split his time between DC and Boston anymore. No longer overworked.

Everything was different. Incidents that had once been settled in the time space were fought out in the real world instead, each of them coming to a slightly different conclusion than they had before.

The world was different. Amelia couldn’t be sure if it was any better, but at least it was free from interference.

She dressed for school in her bedroom, noticing the differences between this room and the one she had known before.

Instead of towering shelves full of books, some of the walls in her bedroom displayed photographs.

Pictures of her and her parents when she was a child.

Downstairs, her father was cooking breakfast, the smell of eggs and coffee drifting throughout the house.

He smiled when he saw her, dressed in a sweater and a pair of slacks, red hair glossy and neat.

“Morning,” he said. “How’d you sleep? No more late-night romps in my office, I hope?

” He set a mug of coffee down in front of her, looking sheepish.

“I talked to your mother last night,” he explained, nodding at it.

“She seems to think that drinking coffee is an important part of embracing your German heritage, so who am I to get in the way?”

Amelia giggled in spite of herself. “Thanks,” she said, reaching for the cream and sugar. “Where is…”

“Your mother?” Ernest jerked his head to the window. “Out in the garden.” He set another cup of coffee down in front of her. “Take this out to her while I finish breakfast, will you? Tell her it’s almost ready.”

Amelia took the cup and slipped through the back door, her feet knowing the way even though her mind was still catching up.

In the garden, the air was chilly. The last warmth of summer was slowly fading.

Amelia walked the gravel path, looking down at the neatly planted flowers lining either side of it.

Bushels of Russian sage, catmint, and yarrow still clung to their petals.

The trees were alight with early autumnal oranges and reds.

A little ahead, near the gate, a woman with golden hair was standing among the flower beds.

Her hair was neither as long as Lisavet Levy’s nor as short as Moira’s.

Some of the golden color was streaked with silver, just enough to be noticeable, but not so much that it detracted from the radiant, moonlit color.

Amelia slowed her pace. The woman looked up, smiling when she saw her coming.

“Good morning,” she said warmly.